Openclaw

I just moved my self-hosted OpenClaw from one cloud VM to another. The whole thing — from “let me have a look at what’s running” to “the bot replied to my Telegram message on the new box” — took about 90 minutes, and the bot was offline for less than two of them. The interesting part isn’t that it worked. The interesting part is what shape the plan had to take so that nothing ended up in a half-migrated state, and how OpenClaw itself helped me think through the migration before I touched a single file. ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about fixing OpenClaw after context bloat and bad model routing. Then I immediately made a related mistake in the opposite direction. I switched the default model to openai/gpt-5.4 and kept the context window at 32,000 tokens. I wanted to test the model on real daily workloads. What I got instead was a week of repeating myself, failing background jobs, and an assistant that felt like it had short-term amnesia. ...

I hit a very predictable failure mode in AI automation: I left the defaults alone for too long. Background jobs accumulated too much context, some of them were still landing on expensive models, and a couple of nightly tasks started timing out. The fix was not dramatic. It was mostly configuration discipline. This was not an OpenClaw bug. It was a bad operating posture. What Broke Four things were interacting badly. ...

There’s a temptation, when you spot a problem in a personal project, to just fix it. Open the file, start editing, ship. It feels productive. It often isn’t. This week I migrated the state layer of my personal AI assistant from a collection of flat JSON files to SQLite. The migration itself took about 20 minutes of actual work, spread across four automated phases. The planning took two hours. And the planning was the most valuable part. ...

I run OpenClaw as my personal AI assistant — it handles my daily GTD rituals, monitors my email, tracks calendar events, and responds to me on Telegram throughout the day. I depend on it for essential, everyday tasks. Which means when it breaks, I feel it immediately. For a long time, updating it felt like defusing a bomb. The Problem: Updates Are Terrifying When You Depend on the System Every time a new version of OpenClaw dropped, I’d put off installing it. Not because I didn’t want the new features, but because I’d been burned before. Here’s a sample of what had gone wrong across previous updates: ...

I’ve been running OpenClaw as my personal AI assistant for a few months now — mostly typing to it. Yesterday I added voice, and it changes the dynamic completely. The setup: 20 minutes, free tier The whole thing runs on ElevenLabs for text-to-speech. The free tier is genuinely enough — you get a generous monthly character allowance, plenty for daily conversational use. Setup steps: Create a free account at elevenlabs.io Grab your API key from the profile settings Add it to your OpenClaw config: "talk": { "provider": "elevenlabs", "providers": { "elevenlabs": { "apiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE" } } } That’s it. Restart the gateway and voice is live. ...

I’ve been running an AI personal assistant (via OpenClaw) for a couple of months now. It checks my emails, sends me a daily news digest, prepares GTD rituals, tracks weather before my morning runs, and does a dozen other things automatically. Last week I noticed something off: I hadn’t received a daily email notification in a while. Not an error. Not a crash. Just… silence. The job was running. The logs looked fine. But nothing was arriving. ...

I’ve been running a personal AI assistant for a few months now — handling email triage, GTD rituals, news digests, morning run reminders, and a bunch of other cron-driven automation. It’s genuinely changed how I operate day-to-day. But here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: the model underneath everything matters more than you’d think. The Reasoning Problem At some point I had extended reasoning enabled on my assistant. In theory, this should make responses more thoughtful — the model “thinks before it speaks.” In practice, it made every message reply a slow, verbose rewrite of whatever I’d asked. Inconvenient enough that I just switched it off. ...

Email overload is a modern disease. Hundreds of emails a day, most of them noise. Newsletters you forgot you subscribed to. Marketing emails disguised as personal messages. Bank statements. Gas bills. The occasional important email buried in the flood. I tried fixing this with a simple ignore list. It didn’t scale. This is the story of how I built a multi-layer email filtering system that replaced hardcoded bash patterns with intelligent scoring, security scanning, and adaptive learning. ...

Running an AI assistant with shell access, file system permissions, and messaging integrations is powerful. It’s also a meaningful security surface. You’re giving a language model the ability to execute commands, read files, and respond to messages on your behalf. This isn’t theoretical risk. If you configure OpenClaw carelessly, you’re handing strangers the keys to your system. Here’s how to run OpenClaw safely: keep it updated, audit it regularly, and vet plugins before you enable them. ...